DANGERS OF SMOKING

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29798, 14 April 1962, Page 13

DANGERS OF SMOKING

“Four Major

Diseases” Smokers are laying themselves open to four major diseases —lung cancer, chronic bronchitis, coronary artery disease, and peptic ulcer, Professor J. W. Crofton, professor of respiratory diseases at the University of Edinburgh, said in Christchurch. If a man of 35 was smoking 25 or more cigarettes a day. he had a one in three chance of dying before he was 65, said Professor Crofton. Probably the same applied to women, the reason for the lower death-rate for lung cancer, for example, among women being probably that, in general, heavy smoking by women had become socially acceptable much more recently and that even now women tended to smoke less than men. Maori women, who smoked as much as or more than their men, had a deathrate from lung-cancer at least four times as high as New Zealand women of European descent. In Britain, the chances of a smoker dying before he was 65 were twice as high as for a non-smoker. Chronic bronchitis was a disease which caused increasing invalidism rather than a rapid death. It could interfere with a man’s working life. Lung cancer had been shown to be closely connected with smoking in very many experiments in at least nine different countries. There was “just no contrary evidence at all,” he said.